Daily Archives: 29 Jun 2014

On this day in 1920, the great, great, great special effects artist Ray Harryhausen was born. He is best remembered for his films Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. His work holds up surprisingly well in this world of computer animation where literally anything can be done. Something to note about his films is that the look of them is not dictated by his special effects. That is a common complaint of mine about many more modern special effects.

Harryhausen was originally inspired by the work of Willis O’Brien on the movie King Kong. And he even managed to meet O’Brien when he was fairly young. After working at the bottom rungs of the film industry—notably under Frank Capra during World War II—he eventually worked as assistant animator under O’Brien for the film, Mighty Joe Young, where Harryhausen ended up doing most of the actual animation while O’Brien worked on the more fundamental technical problems. I suspect this was how things usually worked.

Within four years, Harryhausen got to be in charge of his own film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms—basically a Godzilla film, although the connection goes the other way since Godzilla didn’t appear for another year, and the original screenplay title was “The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” By 1958, Harryhausen brought the process to color films with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. He continued this on with other notable films like Jason and the Argonauts in 1963 through to his last film in 1981, Clash of the Titans. In 2010, Clash of the Titans was remade just to prove that more advanced technology doesn’t lead to better films.